Time to rethink spy chief

Does the United States really need an Office of the Director of National Intelligence to protect itself?

After all, Gen. David Petraeus, the most-lauded U.S. general in two generations, was confirmed by the Senate as CIA director June 30, and Leon Panetta — widely regarded as one of the most effective managers-who-is-also-a-Democrat — was sworn in as defense secretary July 1. The U.S. now has the national security dream team overseeing the vast majority of its intelligence community.

Story Continued Below

Better yet, there’s now a military man at the CIA and an intelligence guy at the Defense Department — so Petraeus and Panetta have a deep understanding of the other’s organization. Do they really need James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence, telling them how to “get along”? The answer, clearly, is no. The ODNI was a bad idea that hasn’t improved with age.

This isn’t meant as an attack on Clapper, a career intelligence officer who has succeeded in multiple government capacities. But between the twin Beltway behemoths of Petraeus and Panetta, Clapper — theoretically in charge of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy — stands little chance of making his voice heard.

In just about any future high-stakes institutional knife fight between the ODNI and the Pentagon or the CIA, Clapper, armed with only a glut of midlevel bureaucrats and ever-expanding stacks of memoranda, is likely to get cut to ribbons.

It also remains unclear whether the ODNI has overcome the problems that have plagued it since the beginning. In 2009 (long before Clapper took over), the organization’s inspector general released a fiery report, noting that the new office had failed to live up to its mission. Among the damning conclusions was that “the majority of the ODNI and [intelligence community] employees [including many senior officials] … were unable to articulate a clear understanding of the ODNI’s mission, roles and responsibilities.”

In addition, other intelligence agencies complained that the ODNI “sends duplicative taskings and conflicting messages, … thereby undermining the ODNI’s credibility and fueling assertions that the ODNI is just an ‘additional layer of bureaucracy.’”

Perhaps Clapper has stanched the rapidly expanding bureaucratic hemorrhage the report revealed. But even the casual reader could see that the problems are largely systemic — not something that a change at the top can easily fix.

Congress should revisit the legislation that created the ODNI and re-evalutate its official mission to “forge an intelligence community that delivers the most insightful intelligence possible.”

It isn’t working that way now — and never has.

One reason is its hasty, ill-considered conception. In the rush to answer the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations, Congress made a serious mistake — the committees responsible for the final language of the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act did not have jurisdiction over the intelligence communities, did not know how the intelligence budgets worked and were under tremendous pressure to deliver legislation that would pass the president’s desk.

As a result, a number of politically expedient but unworkable solutions became real, complicating and permanently hamstringing the ODNI.